Synapse: Beeper Edition

This is Beeper's custom version of synapse, we rebase roughly 25 commits on top of each upstream release with a few Beeper specific modifications. We also have an actual Synapse fork here: beeper/synapse-fork which is where we make changes we expect to merge into upstream.

Branching strategy

We have a bunch of branches. The main development branch for Beeper is the beeper branch. Push commits here and they get built for our Docker registry. The GitHub Actions logs include the specific image tag, which is based on the original upstream version as well as the commit hash.

We also have versioned beeper-x.y.z branches. These are used to archive the history of the beeper branch as it is rebased onto newer upstream Synapse versions. When rebasing, we copy the current beeper branch back onto the old beeper-x.y.z branch for historical reference, then create a new beeper-x.y.z branch based on the new upstream version and rebase the beeper branch onto it, then force-push that resulting commit into the original beeper branch, which will become the new development target.

We also have upstream-x.y.z branches that just track the upstream tags that we use as bases for Beeper changes, see the rebase flow below.

CI setup

Note that we have a separate beeper-ci.yml GitHub Actions workflow. It runs exclusively on the beeper* branches, in place of the other CI workflows that upstream uses and that we have not removed from our fork. Don't get confused between the two.

Rebase flow

Create PR

Here we're upgrading to v1.96.1:

# Make a new branch from the upstream release, we do this so we can create a PR
# of Beeper -> upstream to run tests/confirm we're happy.
git checkout -f v1.96.1
git checkout -b upstream-1.96.1
git push -u beeper upstream-1.96.1

# Check out the base branch, pull any changes
git checkout beeper
git pull

# Now create a new branch to rebase
git checkout -b beeper-1.96.1
# And do the rebase
git rebase v1.96.1
# fix any conflicts...

# Push and make a PR from this branch to the upstream one created above
git push -u beeper beeper-1.96.1

Make release

Once it's ready we just overwrite the beeper branch with the new one:

git checkout beeper-1.96.1
git push --force beeper beeper